Tag / COVID-19

by Nathan Coumbe

Some ideas on hiring (Part 3 of “Same job, different pay”)

(This is part 3 in a rant on hiring, salaries, and job postings. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.)

If someone with less experience than I, who didn’t attend college like I did, started today at the company I currently work for, in the same role I hold now—do I think she should be paid the same salary as me?

Absolutely, I do.

The work is the work, and if she is doing the same work as me, to spec, she should earn the same amount I do. My years of experience and educational background do not entitle me to a higher salary if we’re doing the same work.

Can she do the work as is expected of her? That’s all that matters.

And for someone looking for a job like mine, if they can learn how to do it well, then why does it matter how they learned?

So if I’m against education as a prerequisite for entry, how should we go about hiring people?

I have two ideas, and the first is simple: more companies should adopt open hiring practices.

There’s a factory in New York that makes the brownies for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. If you want to work at the factory, you put your name on a list.

When a job opens at the factory and you’re next on the list, you get a call asking if you’re still interested in the job. If you are, you report to training, and if you can pass the training, you’re hired.

They don’t care about education, criminal backgrounds, living situation, previous employment, or current skills. If you can learn how to do the job, you get the job at the wage they pay everyone else.

Keep a list of applicants, hire them in order when jobs open up, and train them to do the work.

Why doesn’t every restaurant, coffee shop, and retail establishment in the world already do this?

Simple: They’re scared of making a bad hire. They worry that they’ll hire someone who doesn’t show up to work, arrives late, has a bad attitude, or struggles to perform.

Well… what happens when those same people are hired through traditional (i.e., shitty) job search qualifications?

They get fired.

And if you implement open hiring practices, you spend a lot less money on the recruitment process than you otherwise would, so you lose out on a lot less if you must fire someone.

The absurdity of hiring people through traditional methods of posting job openings, soliciting hundreds of résumés, and holding interviews gives companies a sense of control over who they hire.

But it’s an illusion: either the person will work out or they won’t. And interviewing people with the “right” background on paper isn’t a guarantee that they’re a good hire.

Now, I already know that this idea is so radical for people in knowledge work that it won’t happen anytime soon, even though I firmly believe many companies can hire and train people to perform a significant percentage of the available office jobs out there.

So, what if you’re absolutely certain that you can’t use open hiring due to the nature of the work your company does? Let’s say, because you don’t have the time or resources to train a person to the level you need quickly enough to make it worthwhile.

That’s where my second solution comes into play: contingency hiring.

Time for a story: I was laid off a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic began (from a job I had held for only a few months).

My job search lasted nearly a year (no one was hiring). It was excruciating and terrifying.

But one of the best things that ever happened to me in terms of my career happened near the end: a CEO took a chance on me in an unconventional way.

I’d been studying (and, to some small extent, practicing) marketing for a couple of years before the layoff. I’d spent a lot of time during my unemployment talking to people in the field to get a sense of the jobs available. I wanted to know what skills and knowledge they required so I could make myself more appealing to employers.

A former classmate from university recommended me for her role at a marketing agency when she left to take another job. I went into the interview feeling woefully underqualified, but I knew I had a decent foundation of self-study to build on and could learn the rest of what I needed to know on the job.

The CEO agreed, but was still somewhat reluctant to fully commit to this neophyte in the marketing world (and who wouldn’t be?). So he offered me a deal:

He said that he would let me work for the agency for four weeks in exchange for a single lump-sum payment to see if I could do—or learn how to do—the work required for the role.

After that, we would reconvene, and depending on the results, either he would hire me full-time, or we would part ways with no hard feelings and gratitude for giving the company my time and skill.

It was one of the most generous and thoughtful offers I’d ever gotten.1

If I were starting my own business today, this is exactly how I would hire someone. I’d post a job opening, and then I would select an applicant to work with me on a contingency basis.

Rather than conducting an interview (which only tells me if she’s good at interviewing), I would work on a project with her that I already needed to complete for the business, and I would pay her for her time.

If, at the end of the project, we found it was a good fit (and she still wanted to work for me, because she would also get to try out the business), I would extend a full-time offer to her.

Why doesn’t every company do this all the time? They get work done, can assess whether the person is a good fit for the role (which isn’t always apparent from an interview), and the applicant not only gets paid but also gets to test whether it’s a role they actually want.

I can’t fix the hiring process simply by writing and ranting about it. But I do know that it’s 100% broken right now.

Social media (LinkedIn) has made it worse, not better.

AI and ridiculous job requirements for college degrees and 30 years of experience have reduced the job search to months or years of misery, frustration, and indignity.

But these simple tweaks—from removing degree requirements to contingency hiring—could go a long way to fixing a broken system.

  1. I didn’t end up accepting his offer. I asked him to give me a day or two to think about it and discuss it with my wife, which he happily agreed to.

    Literally, that same day, after I got home from the interview, I got a call from another company I’d had a few interviews with. They had a firm offer for me for full-time remote work with benefits.

    I called him that evening to let him know I was taking the other job offer, which he completely understood. But he also let me know that the offer was still on the table if it didn’t work out. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

Touching the hot stove

Sometimes, you just have to let people touch the metaphorical hot stove.

We work so hard to enact safeguards that protect people from making poor choices. But those safeguards are often viewed as a shackle on individual liberty, either because they don’t understand or don’t care.

For many, experiencing the consequences of their actions and choices is the only way they’ll learn.

The problem is that, in a society as interconnected and dependent as ours, those of us who know the stove is hot often get burned in the process.

by Nathan Coumbe

If you value it, subsidize it

You would think that after what we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing shortage of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners, we would be seeing some sort of decline in the price of these educational programs.

Fewer people going into the field would mean lower prices for those programs, right? (Supply and demand.)

Let me hypothesize why this might not be happening.

We have deeply ingrained in our culture the idea that the most important thing you can do is make a lot of money. Therefore, the best thing you can do for yourself is obtain a degree that leads to a certain type of job that pays well.

This means that, because we’ve conditioned our kids to believe that money is everything, people will continue to borrow astronomical amounts of money to attend medical school, believing that they will earn enough to cover it afterward. 

I suspect that a similar pattern is emerging with other college degrees, where individuals are borrowing six figures to earn degrees that lead to jobs paying half that or less, and this will eventually affect medical students. 

This trend is already happening with dental students. There are now a few hundred dentists in the United States who owe more than $1 million in student debt!

Tuition costs are likely to continue rising while salaries remain stagnant. Consequently, we may have doctors with $1 million in loans earning $250,000 a year (or less).

I think one solution is collective action. To make a difference, we, as a society, must unite and declare that we will not continue this way. But that’s hard to do.

The other option is to implement some form of government intervention based on the values we hold as a country.

If we believe that we need more doctors, engineers, and teachers in this country, rather than more hedge fund managers and trust-fund babies, our policies have to match that belief.

One of my professors in college—a funny little self-described country boy from the Mississippi Delta—had something of a law he preached to us:

  • If you want people to start do something, subsidize it.
  • If you want people to stop doing something, tax it.

It works: this very idea is how we almost created a generation of non-smokers.

All the ad campaigns in the world about the dangers of smoking didn’t make a difference. What worked was taxing cigarettes to make them so prohibitively expensive that most Gen-Zers never started smoking them to begin with.

Now, we’re “taxing” the wrong things in the form of tuition increases and poor salaries.

Right now, we’re making it incredibly expensive to become a doctor or engineer. Or we’re making other fields financially unviable to work in (e.g., teaching) by failing to pay practitioners what they’re worth.

Our tax incentives and subsidies (the “rewards” our government doles out) don’t help these people, but they damn sure help those who are less visibly beneficial to society but make vastly more money. It’s why we have so many people entering finance and so few entering teaching.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time we flipped this.

by Nathan Coumbe

The teaching experience got worse after COVID

When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, it sent all the children home for an extended period of virtual schooling. This showed parents what it was like to deal with lots of kids all day long.

Not just “deal” with them either, but also hopefully have them learn something.

Multiply parents’ experience with their handful of children by 10, and that was what the average schoolteacher dealt with on a daily basis for years before 2020.

What fascinates me about this, however, is that the experience didn’t lead to an outpouring of support. It didn’t lead to calls for higher pay, better working conditions, and more classroom assistance for teachers.

Instead, COVID-19 made schooling much, much worse for teachers as, inexplicably, it led to a focus on culture war issues and concerns over what was being taught in the classrooms.

by Nathan Coumbe

Denis Waitley was wildly optimistic…

Denis Waitley was wildly optimistic about the future when he recorded “The Psychology of Winning” in the 1990s.

Here are just some of those predictions:

  • Hydrogen-powered cars that cleaned the air as we drove them by 2010.
  • 100% online, virtual education for all students everywhere. No need to drive to classes anymore when you can just access everything online.
  • Supersonic and hypersonic planes used as our normal mode of transportation. Any major city within a three-hour flight no matter where you are on the planet. 
  • High school seniors flying to Hong Kong for their senior prom in two hours. Don’t sneak over to Australia for the afterparty—and make sure you’re home by 1am!

Denis also predicted that by the year 2000, women would have equal pay with men and be equally represented in business schools, law schools, and entrepreneurial startups.

Like I said, wildly optimistic. It might even seem laughable, like something out of a futuristic 80s movie.

And yet…

We are so busy trying to get back to normal after this pandemic, we’ve somehow lost all the opportunity to actually make these happen.

Because of COVID-19, we already did 100% online, virtual education for a year and a half. It wasn’t perfect (far from it). But it worked. It’s been shown to be possible. 

But we were so busy being focused on “getting back to normal,” we seemed to have missed the opportunity to push it further and make it better.

I don’t know the first thing about hydrogen scrubbing and powered cars. But I do know we have the technology for all-electric vehicles that don’t pump pollution and toxins into the air on a daily basis (multiple companies have this tech). 

But instead, we’re buying bigger, badder, less efficient, gas-guzzling, pollution-admitting, tank-like vehicles, all in an effort to make a statement about our political views or our masculinity.

And here we are, 22 past after the year 2000… And women are still fighting for equal pay, equal representation, and control over their own bodies, not to mention all the other genders and races fighting for the same things.

So yes, Dennis was wildly optimistic. But it’s understandable why.

Because even back then the technology was coming online, the possibilities were there, and he saw them and thought, “Surely the world will embrace all of this—right?”

Yet here we are. Rejecting all of it out of hand. 

Yes—some of these wonderful possibilities were forced on us by a horrible situation… Yet they were still wonderful opportunities. 

But we were so desperate to go back to normal that we looked them in the face and said, “No thank you.” 

We’re operating with 21st-century technology and possibilities while trying to stay in a 20th-century world. Why?

Because it’s the world we know. It’s the status quo. It’s “the regular kind.”

I feel like we missed a big opportunity here. And now I’m worried it may be years or decades before what’s possible actually comes to fruition.

by Nathan Coumbe

Life lessons from the last 18 months

Cherish your loved ones – they’ll be taken from you when you least expect it.

I’ve lost three close family members in 18 months. My father-in-law dropped dead of heart failure in December 2019. He was in perfect health.

My uncle died of cancer 6 months later. I had just seen him at Thanksgiving the previous year, and he seemed to be doing just fine.

Then my dad died in May. I had just spoken with him on the phone a month before… He sounded just like his old self. By the time I got to see him, he couldn’t speak or see me. I was able to say goodbye, but I’ll never know if he heard me.

And I might be losing someone else soon.

Tell your family you love them after you finish reading this. Then do it every day from now on.

Serious illness—or even death—can strike you down no matter your age or health.

My wife and I took the COVID-19 pandemic seriously. We quarantined, wore masks, and did all we were advised to do by the CDC. And both of us still managed to catch it.

My wife had a fever for eight days. I ended up in the ICU on forced oxygen for eight days gasping for breath. Wondering if this was what it felt like to die. The doctors told me had I not come in the night that I did, I would have died in my sleep.

I spent Christmas and New Year’s in a hospital room isolated and alone—except for the occasional nurse or technician. Eight days. And there were people around me even worse off than I was.

I was 30 years old and in perfect health. And I’m still recovering.

Never chase money – you’ll always end up miserable.

I was in my sweet spot at a job I enjoyed—teaching classes all day and putting my creative skills to use on a daily basis. But I felt I wasn’t making enough money, so I took a promotion.

The money wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. And I wound up in a miserable role that stressed me out more than I could have ever imagined.

Then another offer came my way, a chance to escape that misery, and it came with a decent bump in pay. But I had an uneasy feeling about it during the interviews.

I took it anyway, and it left me just as miserable as I was before, but for different reasons.

It might be a cliche, but find something that makes you happy. Then find a way to make a living doing it. Don’t take jobs you know don’t fit you simply because they offer you more money.

Take any or all of these lessons to heart. Let them guide your actions for the last half of 2021 and beyond.

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by Nathan Coumbe

Great News on a Monday!

Random personal post this afternoon:

This morning I got a clean bill of health from my pulmonologist! Clear chest x-rays and no other issues (other than a cough and general weakness) after my horrible battle with COVID-19 in December. 

I’ve been diligently pushing myself a little harder each day and hit my personal post-COVID hospitalization best of walking 2 miles last Friday. I even managed a light strength workout this morning. 

After my appointment, I got ANOTHER piece of great news telling me I’d been selected to interview at one of my DREAM COMPANIES this week…hopefully more news on this to come

Hard work, networking, and practice pay off in all areas of our lives. 

by Nathan Coumbe

When Simple Things Are Stupid Hard

My upper back is tired. And the most strenuous thing I’ve done today is carry a few clothes to the washing machine.

Just walking around my home, trying to expand my lungs…it’s enough to leave me winded, short of breath in my dining room chair.

The simple act of chewing feels like I’m lifting a barbell with my neck. I imagine it’s the same strain I felt as an infant learning to lift my head.

Recovering from a major illness makes every little thing you take for granted feel like a Herculean effort.

Starting over with anything feels the same way. Getting laid off. Beginning a new career field. Learning a new physical skill. Getting back some modicum of physical strength and breathing normalcy…

It makes you feel inept…weak…almost helpless. “This shouldn’t be this hard,” you think. But it is.

“Should” doesn’t have any say in reality. All you can do is keep pushing, a little bit each day.

Relearn how to roll over, to crawl, to stand up, to walk…and eventually start running again.

(I was released from the hospital yesterday in case you missed my post.)

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by Nathan Coumbe

Why is freelancing so terrifying?

We human beings like security – it encompasses the first two levels of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs.” It’s fundamental.

To get that feeling of security, we work hourly wage jobs; we try to get hired at famous companies for regular, unchanging salaries with hopes for a 3% raise every year (which doesn’t outpace inflation).

Freelancing – being “a knight without a king” as Seth Godin likes to say – seemingly goes against that feeling of security. There is no guarantee; you don’t get paid simply for showing up somewhere for a specified amount of time.

But it’s better.

The illusion

There is no security in hourly rates; there is no security in working for a famous company. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, the moment something bad or unexpected happens, your security is at risk.

The security is an illusion. No longer can we work at the same company for 20 years, slowly moving up a corporate ladder, waiting for that day when we call it quits and HR hands us a gold watch and the envelope containing our pension information.

There is no security anymore. There is only you.

“Security lies in our ability to produce.”

–General Douglas MacArthur

Make your own security

What do you already know or do well?

Can you write? Create websites? Draw and paint? Build things with your hands? Sell?

Maybe you’re a whiz at smoothing customers’ ruffled feathers. Perhaps you have a knack for motivating and encouraging other people.

There is something you already do, or something you already know about, that other people are willing to pay for. You simply have to muster the courage to offer it to them.

Each of us must explicitly state to ourselves what we know how to do and do well. That knowledge and the willingness to execute on it are the only things that give us any sort of real security in the workplace.

If you can find someone and offer them something they are willing to pay for, and do that over and over again, you are a freelancer. You have no boss, no one telling you what to do next, but also no one telling you, “I’m sorry but we have to let you go.”

You have no guarantee of income – in either direction! You can make as little or as much as you want, as long as people are willing to pay for it. But I’ll bet you got stopped on the phrase “no guarantee” or “as little…as you want” while glossing over the rest of it.

As a freelancer, you determine your job, the work you do, your hours, the people you serve. Perhaps it’s not the loss of security you fear: it’s the fear of complete and total responsibility for your success or failure.

We aren’t used to that, but it’s the only way we’ll survive.

Secure your own future today. Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you.

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by Nathan Coumbe

How to get an education that pays during your quarantine

When was the last time you learned something new?

It was probably a few minutes ago when you read an article on your favorite social media site, and you weren’t even aware you were learning. Why not do it intentionally?

Learning and education don’t cease when school ends. If it does, you’ve made a choice, and you will quickly find yourself becoming obsolete.

No one cares about the degree you got 10 years ago. They want to know if you are competent in the areas needed to accomplish the kind of work you want to do.

Learning and going to school are not the same thing. You might have hated school, but you definitely love learning. School requires that you do things you hate, but you aren’t in school anymore. You can learn whatever you want to learn right now.

Always wanted to learn how to draw? Do you want to redo math, not because you have to but because you want to? Maybe you want to learn calligraphy or tennis. Perhaps you want to get a new job, but you don’t have the marketing skills needed by the company. Now is the time, and now you HAVE time.

Learning anything new is part of your ongoing education. Why not do it intentionally? What are you doing right now to invest in your own education?

I’ll give you some ideas.

How to learn for free (or at least cheaply)

  1. Read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you only do one thing on this list, do this one. The $10 you spend on this book will be the best investment you ever make. It will change your outlook on life, it will improve your relationships with other people, and it will revolutionize how you act.
  2. Take online courses.
    • LinkedIn Learning
    • Udemy
    • Coursera – want a recommendation? Seth Godin has the absolute best courses on Udemy. Start there.
    • Khan Academy (retake high school absolutely free and enjoy it this time)
    • CreativeLive – learn how to draw, take stunning photographs, start your own creative freelancing business, and so much more.
    • Massachussetts Institute of Technology OCW (seriously, take actual courses from MIT absolutely free)
    • edX – Speaking of great schools, this website lets you take real, full courses from Ivy League schools from the comfort of your living room for free. No strings attached. If you want a certificate to hang on your wall or post on LinkedIn, you can pay a small fee and get proof that you completed Ivy League courses.
    • HubSpot Academy – become an expert in marketing for absolutely nothing.
  3. Read books.
    • Libraries still exist. Even if they aren’t open right now, you can download e-books for free from every library in the country. Go read books on subjects about which you are curious. It doesn’t cost you a dime.
    • Download the Kindle app for free on your phone. Then buy The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Seriously. You can buy books on every subject imaginable for less than $10 each. Most of the time you can get them for $5 or even $0.99. There is no excuse for failing to read. Swap 30 minutes a day of mindlessly scrolling Instagram, and you will become an expert on a subject in a matter of weeks or months.
  4. Subscribe to magazines.
    • Read the Harvard Business Review. It is well worth $18 a month. Get an entire master’s degree in business for what you spend on lunch.
    • Success Magazine and Inc. are two of my favorites. The former will inspire you to live your best life; the latter will give you much-needed insights on how to succeed in any work or business.
  5. Listen to podcasts – again, FREE.
    • “Akimbo” by Seth Godin
    • “48 Days to the Work You Love” by Dan Miller
    • “EntreLeadership” from Ramsey Solutions
    • “On Leadership with Scott Miller” from Franklin Covey
  6. Watch TED Talks and documentaries on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.

There is no reason for you not to come out of this crisis with new skills, new knowledge, and an unofficial masters degree in one subject or another.

Be proactive. Take control of your education today.

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